Your Nerdy Best Friend

Ad Blocker for Browsers

Just by installing a quick plugin for your browser, you can speed up web pages and stop annoying ads from cluttering up your screen. I’m AMAZED at how fast pages load without the ads.

Adblock Plus is an open-source product that works on a whole bunch of different browsers, and starting this week you can download the browser as an app for both Android and iOS. This means you would surf the web through the app rather than Safari or Chrome on your devices. When I downloaded the app Peace from the App Store after (updating rather painfully) to iOS 9, Safari pages load super fast, too, and I would imagine that they use less data to get the page to me (but I’m not sure about that — just a guess).

Check out the very brief video below showing how dang easy it is to reduce a cluttered, slow-loading page to a clean reading palette.

Now here’s something to think about… what if we all install ad blockers? How will people who provide us with free content make a living? What if your website has ads? Will you lose a necessary source of income? Yes, ads are obnoxious, but in our “freemium” world, the ads subsidize the many, many things we get for free. On the other hand, haven’t most of us become immune to the ads?

One bright spot for advertisers who use pay-per-click advertising: your ads will still appear on mobile apps, which is where most of the advertising clicks come from anyway these days.